Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

I Saw Ramallah

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
Englisch
Daunt Bookserschienen am01.08.2024
A fierce and moving memoir on returning to Palestine, the meaning of exile and homeland, and the habitual place and status of a person, from the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Barred from his homeland after 1967's Six-Day War, Barghouti spent thirty years in exile: shuttling between the world's cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns to Ramallah for the first time since the Israeli occupation, crossing a wooden bridge over the Jordan River, Barghouti is unable to recognise the city of his youth. He discovers how the joy of return and reunion is accompanied by a feeling of insurmountable loss. A tour de force of memory, reflection and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is deeply humane and is essential to any balanced understanding of today's Middle East.

Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944 and graduated from Cairo University in 1967. His poems have been published in Beirut, Amman and Cairo, and his collected works were published in Beirut in 1997.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR17,50
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR13,00
E-BookEPUBDRM AdobeE-Book
EUR13,49
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR9,60

Produkt

KlappentextA fierce and moving memoir on returning to Palestine, the meaning of exile and homeland, and the habitual place and status of a person, from the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Barred from his homeland after 1967's Six-Day War, Barghouti spent thirty years in exile: shuttling between the world's cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns to Ramallah for the first time since the Israeli occupation, crossing a wooden bridge over the Jordan River, Barghouti is unable to recognise the city of his youth. He discovers how the joy of return and reunion is accompanied by a feeling of insurmountable loss. A tour de force of memory, reflection and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is deeply humane and is essential to any balanced understanding of today's Middle East.

Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944 and graduated from Cairo University in 1967. His poems have been published in Beirut, Amman and Cairo, and his collected works were published in Beirut in 1997.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781917092050
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum01.08.2024
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse895 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.17226880
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



 
 


The first morning in Ramallah. I wake up and hasten to open the window.

What are these elegant houses, Abu Hazim?´ I asked, pointing at Jabal al-Tawil, which overlooks Ramallah and Bireh.

A settlement.´

Then he added: Tea? Coffee? Breakfast is ready.´

What a beginning to my resumed relationship with the homeland! Politics confront me at every turn. But in Ramallah and Bireh there are things other than the settlements.

Returning to the city of your childhood and your youth after thirty years you try to coax joy to your heart as you would coax chickens to their barley. Why is it that your joy has to be coaxed and persuaded? That it will not simply manifest itself strong and clear? Is it because there is something incomplete about the whole scene? Something missing from the promise, and from what is fulfilled of the promise? Is it because you are burdened? Because you are not yet used to familiarity? Are you in the dance or sitting it out? Are your objections to the music or to the musicians?

Joy needs training and experience. You have to take the first step. Ramallah will not take it. Ramallah is content with what she is. She knows what she has lived through. The near ones are near and the far ones are far. She has gone her way, sometimes as her people willed, and more often as her enemies willed. She has suffered and she has endured. Is she waiting to rest her head on your shoulder or is it you who seeks refuge in her strength?

A confused meeting. It is unclear who is giving and who is taking. You used to say that to your woman. Love is the confusion of roles between the giver and the taker. So we are speaking of love. Very well then: here are the chickens of joy responding to the spontaneous coaxing (is there such a thing as spontaneous coaxing?). You say take me to my school, to Shari al-Iza a, to the house of Khali Abu Fakhri, to the Liftawi Building. Take me to the home of Hajja Umm Isma il, to houses I have lived in and paths I have trodden. Here you are: treading them again - as Mounif could not. Mounif, who lies now in his grave on the edge of Amman. Being forbidden to return killed him. Three years ago they sent him back from the bridge after a day of waiting. He tried again a few months later and they sent him back a second time. My mother, three years after the event, cannot forget her last moments with him on the bridge. He was desperate to get back into the Palestine that he had left when he was just eighteen years old.

Someone should write about the role of the older brother in the Palestinian family. From his adolescence he is afflicted with the role of brother and father and mother and head of family and dispenser of advice. He is the child who has always to prefer others to himself. The child who gives and does not acquire. The child who keeps watch over a flock both older and younger and so excels at noticing things.

His sudden death was the great deafening collapse in the lives of the whole family. He had arrived at this final gate but it had not opened for him.

Here I step on a patch of earth that his feet will never reach. But the mirror in the waiting room reflected his face when I looked into it. The streets of Ramallah, when I walked in them, saw him walk, hurrying, leading with his chest. Since I handed my papers in to the Bridge Authorities, his face has been with me. This scene is his. It is Mounif´s scene.

Here he waited. Here he felt afraid. Here he had a surge of optimism. Here they questioned him. Here they allowed my mother to enter, and forbade him. Here they had to part. She, forced to continue her journey west towards Ramallah, he east towards Amman and from there to his French exile, where six months later he died. He was not yet fifty-two. Here she screamed at the soldiers: Then let me go back with him.´ Here she wept on his shoulder, and he wept on hers. Here she said goodbye to him for the last time.

When I entered Deir Ghassanah his hand was in mine; we walked side by side to Dar Ra d, our old house. And when I crossed the threshold for the first time in thirty years, the tremor that hit me was the same that took hold of me as I carried his body down into the grave on that dazed rainy day in a cemetery on the edge of Amman.

I have not been to Deir Ghassanah yet. They are preparing a meeting with the townspeople and a poetry reading. I am in Ramallah.


 


I entered by night. The road was long. In 1967 I started walking. From dawn yesterday to dawn today I have not stopped walking.

Here, the obstinate spring does not want to surrender to the shy, hesitant summer at the usual time. Spring shoves forward with its shoulders, its colours. With the chill, dew-laden gasp in its air. With its green, deliberately kept light - just short of the completion required by summer.

The chaos of cities, the quiet of the wild open spaces, the slogans of the young people of the Intifada, the distinctive smell of primary school. The taste of chalk. The voice of Ustaz Ahmad Salih Abd al-Hamid, and Ahmad Farhud and the clever student who can tell the specification from the attribute from the circumstance. And how to describe this circumstance that we have (not?) arrived at? And how to distinguish between ideologies and conflicting opinions and political theories on the one hand and this green fig that covers a third of the hill next to Abu Hazim´s house on the other?

This window I am looking out of is some thirty years away; thirty years and nine volumes of verse. It is the distance of an eye from its tears under the willow of a distant graveyard. I look out of the window at my life, the only life that my mother gave me, at the life of those absent to the farthest point of absence. And why is it that in the window of joy I am overcome by the memory of elegies?

They are here. Do they look with me out of the window? Do they see what I see? Do I rejoice in what gives them joy, make fun of what they mock, object to what they object to? Can I write with their pens on their snow-white paper the things that come to my mind now that martyrs also are part of reality, and that the blood of the freedom fighters and the young people of the Intifada is also real. They are not invented by Walt Disney or born of the imagination of al-Manfaluti. Living people grow old but martyrs grow younger.

Ramallah of the cypresses and the pine trees. The swinging slopes of the hills, the green that speaks in twenty languages of beauty, our first schools where each one of us sees the other children bigger and stronger. The Teachers´ College. The Hashemite. The Friends. Ramallah Secondary. Our guilty glances at the girls from the prep school swinging confidence in their right hands and confusion in their left and dazzling our minds when they look at us while pretending not to. Our small coffee-shops. Al-Manara Square. Abu Hazim told me that al-Manara was removed because of the new traffic system in the town centre. They put traffic lights in its place. The graffiti. The flowers of the Intifada and its transparent steel, its traces clear as a lilac fingerprint.

After how many more thirty years will the ones who never came back return? What does my return, or the return of any other individual mean? It is their return, the return of the millions, that is the true return. Our dead are still in the cemeteries of others. Our living are clinging to foreign borders. On the bridge, that strange border unmatched on any of the world´s five continents, you are overwhelmed by your memories of standing at the borders of others.

So what is new? The others are still masters of the place. They give you a permit. They check your papers. They start files on you. They make you wait. Am I hungry for my own borders? I hate borders, boundaries, limits. The boundaries of the body, of writing, of behaviour, of states. Do I really want boundaries for Palestine? Will they necessarily be better boundaries?

It is not only the stranger who suffers at the border. Citizens too can have a bad time of it. There are no limits to the questions. No boundaries for the homeland. Now I want borders that later I will come to hate.

Ramallah is odd. Many cultures, many faces. Never a masculine or a solemn city. Always first to catch on to some new craze. In Ramallah I saw the dabka as though I were in Deir Ghassanah. And there, in my teenage years, I learnt to tango. In al-Anqar billiard hall I learnt to play snooker. In Ramallah I started to try my hand at poetry, and in the Walid and Dunya and Jamil cinemas I grew to love movies. In Ramallah I grew used to celebrating Christmas and the New Year.

We were never followed by curious eyes as we headed - girls and boys - for Rukab´s garden café, where on white-pebbled paths in the shade of spreading trees we consumed chocolate mousse, peach melba, banana splits, and milk shakes.

In Ramallah Park, Bireh Park, and Na um Park we stayed late into the night with our friends and our families. At the elegant tables of the Ouda Hotel and Harb Hotel we would recognise celebrities wearing fezzes and discussing politics while holding the long tubes of the narghiles. The streets and restaurants and parks of...

mehr

Autor

Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944 andgraduated from Cairo University in 1967. His poems have beenpublished in Beirut, Amman and Cairo, and his collected works were published in Beirut in 1997.